The silly season starts earlier and lasts longer with each cycle, to the point that it is now one big blur. Trying to make a choice which candidate to support for just the nomination is going to be tough this time. On the Republican side there is a bus load of right wing extremists while the Democrats appear to have the “inevitable” Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Republican platform is still stuck on what Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) called “stupid” from social and economic issues to foreign policy. The Democrats may differ with them on social issues, however, on economic and foreign policy their actions speak louder than their words.
So where does that leave the large Democratic left? Thank FSM there is time to ask questions and maybe get some satisfactory answers. But sadly, that may not be too easy considering the quality and tenor of the mainstream news media. Take for example the media obsession with Secretary Clinton’s announcement of her candidacy, her trip by van to Iowa and her stop at a local Chipotle. So far there hasn’t been any substantive discussion about the issues that are most important to the vast majority of America. Except that there has been; it’s just been hard to find.
Former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Clinton has formally entered the 2016 race for the White House in a second bid to become the first woman U.S. president. We host a roundtable discussion with four guests: Joe Conason, editor-in-chief of The National Memo, co-editor of The Investigative Fund, and author of “The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton”; Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer at The Nation; longtime journalist Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig.com and author of many books; and Kshama Sawant, a Socialist city councilmember in Seattle and member of Socialist Alternative, a nationwide organization of social and economic justice activists.
I have to agree with Charles Pierce at Esquire Politics that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is hardly an example of a progressive but this is what will be heard for the next 19 months.
Former senator, 2008 Democratic candidate for presidential nominations and former Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton has announced she is again seeking the office of President of the United States.
Not everyone is jumping on board, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told “Meet the Press” that he is holding back his endorsement until Mrs. Clinton clarified her economic platform. Too friendly with Wall St isn’t her only problem. She has been silent about the m P5+1 negotiations with Iran over it’s nuclear program. She has supported arming the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria uprising. Where does she stand on drone attacks, targeted assassinations and overall use of military force, the out of control surveillance community?
Right now, like the song goes, “Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say, to try and make me change my mind and stay.”
Lennon originally titled the song “Maharishi”, but changed the title to “Sexy Sadie” at George Harrison’s request. Lennon was disillusioned after Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had allegedly made a sexual advance at one of the female members attending the course the Maharishi was teaching at his ashram.
Leaders or spiritual gurus making fools of everyone….
Fear not, wanderers in this WTF Wilderness. Be not dismayed, let not your hearts be troubled. Lift up your eyes like you never have before, and behold the shiny objects flashing around the White House and the DNC. Look upon them in wonder and sing hallelujah, for salvation is at hand. Again.
I hope Obama and the clap louder crowd at Kos Communications will forgive me, but I’m not fired up. I’m not ready to go. The idiocy on full display every hour of every day on the campaign trail exposes how far gone this country’s political system is. We don’t see any real political debate, we don’t hear any real political commentary, there’s no dialogue about the fundamental problems we’re facing, no real solutions are offered. It’s not a campaign. It’s a beer commercial.
Tastes Great! Less Filling!
Corporate capitalism tastes great. No, it’s less filling. Gosh, I just can’t decide who’s right, it has so many appealing features. It’s not perfect yet, but perfection is so close the Beltway binge-drinkers can almost taste it.
Their friends at the five-hundred billion dollar Beltway Brewery are really cranking out the suds, the bipartisan beer trucks are rumbling down the highways of America, driven by austerity alcoholics with places to go and people to see.
It’s Happy Hour, it’s always Happy Hour here at the Trickle Down Tavern, so drink up everyone, order another round, put another trillion dollars in the jukebox. Yeah, I know, Too Big To Fail is the only song on it, but what the hell, get over it, quit pouting and grow up, be a patriotic patriot and praise the plutocrats, they created this paradise of prosperity and are disappointed because we haven’t been grateful enough, so grab a beer-soaked flag and wave it on high.
[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
During the Bush administration the Democrats were opposed to the unitary executive powers that Bush assumed. When they realized how intrusive the government had becomes post 9/11 with surveillance, warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, torture, indefinite detention, military commissions, Guantanamo and the general disregard for the rule of law, the Democrats railed against those policies. What happened that all these polices and now, targeted assassinations without due process have become acceptable? It is incomprehensible that under a Democratic president the right wing shredding of the Constitution is reasonable and defended by those who most vociferously opposed it.
In a New York Times Editorial, Andrew Rosenthal wrote this about President Obama’s “Kill Lists” and the use of unmanned drones:
Apologists for the president’s “just trust me” approach to targeted killings emphasize that the program is highly successful and claim that the drone strikes are extraordinarily precise. John Brennan, the president’s counter-terrorism adviser, said in a recent speech that not a single non-combatant had been killed in a year of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And today’s Times article quoted a senior administration official who said that civilian deaths were in the “single digits.”
But it turns out that even this hey-it’s-better-than-carpet-bombing justification is rather flimsy. The Times article says “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties …It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
The logic, such as it is, is that people who hang around places where Qaeda operatives hang around must be up to no good. That’s the sort of approach that led to the false imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis, including the ones tortured at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Obama used to denounce that kind of thinking.
So now just living in a village where the US thinks, there are insurgents, be they really Al Qaeda or just people defending their country from invaders, all men in the vicinity are enemy combatants, the President can have you killed and they can prove their innocence post mortem. As Cenk Uygur stated, “This is deeply immoral”
“Memorial Day weekend brought news of more U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan as The New York Times raises new questions about President Obama’s so-called “Kill List” of terrorists targeted for assassination. An extensive report in Tuesday’s paper looks at the use of targeted attacks to take out terrorism suspects in other parts of the world, an increasingly important part of the government’s anti-terrorism policies that Barack Obama himself has taken personal responsibility for. According to the story, the President approves every name on the list of terrorism targets, reviewing their biographies and the evidence against them, and then authorizing “lethal action without hand-wringing.”
As the president has slowly drawn down American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of drone attacks to take out senior leaders of al-Qaeda
and the Taliban has become the primary tactic for fighting terrorism overseas. However, it raises a lot of legal and ethical questions about extra-judicial killings of individuals, particularly those who happen to be American citizens…”.
{T]oday the harm that’s caused by raining death from machines in the sky down onto far too many civilians — including someone’s son, brother, or father who wasn’t “up to no good” at all — vastly outweighs any good. Righteous anger over the killing of civilians creates new terrorists faster than the killing of any old ones. As for the morally indefensible position that any male killed in such an attack is “probably up to no good,” isn’t the Obama administration saying the EXACT same thing that George Zimmerman said about Trayvon Martin? [..]
Actually, the similarity with Zimmerman is even greater than I first thought. What he said to the Sanford police dispatcher was that Trayvon Martin “looks like he’s up to no good.” Thank God Zimmerman didn’t have drones, huh?
Some of us on the left, many of whom supported President Obama in 2008, have some very serious issues with this President and those of his supporters who are choosing now to ignore all the horrendous violations of US and International law and the continued trampling of our rights and freedoms, but are now wholeheartedly accepting and defending these policies (Warning: link leads to a right wing Obama 527). They would love it if Obama’s critics would just sit down and shut up.
What has happened to Democrats who were willing to call for not just the impeachment but the arrest and prosecution of both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Now Barack Obama has taken those same policies a step further and made them acceptable to his loyal supporters but not to those of us who still hold to the same principles we did eleven years ago.
OK: so I’ve been working what is, on one level, a Jay Inslee story (Inslee is the Congressman from Washington’s 1st District, now running for Governor in ’12), and, on another level, a story of why Democrats are having all kinds of problems with what should be “natural” constituencies – and why those problems might not be going away anytime soon.
I thought the two elements of this narrative would come together last Monday, when I attended the “announcement event” that marked the beginning of the Inslee Gubernatorial Campaign, and in fact they did…but it wasn’t in a way I would have expected, and that’s why we have something to talk about today.
I reached out to some helpful outside voices, including Inslee himself; all of that will be brought to the discussion – and as another news organization famously offers to do, I’ll report, and leave you to decide.
Both major parties in the United States suffered a probably fatal setback with their plans to buy the next election when a class action lawsuit on behalf of the unborn of all future generations awarded more than $50 trillion to establish a fund for preserving the biosphere.
Democrats immediately whined that they are “better than Republicans,” and UAFG spokesman Jacob Freeze replied…
“You worthless clowns should be happy that you got away with nothing worse than bankruptcy in civil court, because you didn’t even have enough real conviction about anything to prove mens rea, but Republicans are also charged with crimes against humanity and the unborn, and all of them will be hanged, including anyone who even so much as registered as a Republican!”
“So Obama gets a free pass?”
“What are you talking about? Obama will hang with the rest of the Republicans!”
GOP Hair Apparent by Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, Buy this cartoon
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Note: Sections 1-4 contain dozens of additional editorial cartoons and commentary. I’m not sure why but I was getting the below error when trying to post the complete diary. Check out the remaining portions of the diary at Daily Kos.
java.sql.SQLException: Incorrect string value: ‘xC2x8CxC2xA9=1…’ for column ‘extendedText’ at row 1
While we don’t keep it political on RTD all the time, we’re not just all music all the time. We come from the era of Public Enemy, where the music was a tool that helped the outside world understand what was going on. Also helped those within the scene get a better understanding of the ills that life tried throwing at us. On this leak from the forthcoming rockthedub fifth anniversary compilation, FiF, AWK and Y-Love don’t hold back in trying to educate those who might sleep on the ills of the GOP.
Note: Y-Love & AWKWORD will be IN MADISON, WI on Thursday, April 7, on the streets, filming a video for this song!… If you want to get involved, email TheWisconsinSong[at]gmail.com
Note: I kept getting errors about text being corrupted while trying to post the complete diary. This is only half the diary. There are many more sections and editorial cartoons in this diary that I posted over at Daily Kos.
